Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

EDITORS

That is
an editor. He is trying to think of a word. He props his feet on a chair,
which is the editor's way; then he can think better. I do not care much
for this one; his ears are not alike; still, editor suggests the sound
of Edward, and he will do. I could make him better if I had a model, but
I made this one from memory. But is no particular matter; they all look
alike, anyway. They are conceited and troublesome, and don't pay enough.

Another editor. That thing behind his ear is his pencil. Whenever he finds
a bright thing in your manuscript he strikes it out with that. That does
him good, and makes him smile and show his teeth, the way he is doing in
the picture. This one has just been striking out a smart thing, and now
he is sitting there with his thumbs in his vest-holes, gloating. They are
full of envy and malice, editors are.

This
editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk
and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast.

That
is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs crossed
in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies wear, so that he
can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than they are and
get bribes for it and become wealthy.

How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine
editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity,
that his intentions were good.
- Letter to Henry Mills Alden, published in the Chicago Daily Tribune,
November 11, 1906, pg. 3.

In Austria an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to
remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm.
- Europe and Elsewhere

I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words.
- Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field, Fisher

Nobody except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor. It is easy
to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy to clip
sections from other papers; it is easy to string out a correspondence from any
locality; but it is an unspeakable hardship to write editorials. Subjects are
the trouble--the dreary lack of them, I mean. Every day it is drag, drag, drag--think,
and worry and suffer--all the world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns
must be filled. Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done--it is
no trouble to write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your
brains dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year. It makes one
low spirited simply to think of it. The matter that each editor of a daily paper
in America writes in the course of a year would fill from four to eight bulky
volumes like this book! Fancy what a library an editor's work would make, after
twenty or thirty years' service. Yet people marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer,
Dumas, etc., have been able to produce so many books. If these authors had wrought
as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel
at, indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausing consumption
of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up
of facts, like reporting), day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible.
Preachers take two months' holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce
two sermons a week is wearing, in the long run. In truth it must be so, and
is so; and therefore, how an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build
upon them from ten to twenty painstaking editorials a week and keep it up all
the year round, is farther beyond comprehension than ever. Ever since I survived
my week as editor, I have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper that
comes to my hand; it is in admirng the long columns of editorial, and wondering
to myself how in the mischief he did it!
- Roughing It